Supplementary written evidence submitted by the BBC
SUPPLEMENTARY BBC EVIDENCE TO DCMS COMMITTEE INQUIRY INTO DISINFORMATION AND ‘FAKE NEWS’
The BBC has made the challenge of ‘Fake News’, disinformation and misinformation a strategic objective this year, particularly for the World Service. Tony Hall, Director General of the BBC, made the following call to action when he launched the BBC’s Annual Plan in March 2018:
“…..we won’t just talk about the challenges and distortions of ‘Fake News’. We are going to take it on directly….and fight publicly and globally - for news that people can trust and rely on.”
Director of the BBC World Service Group, Jamie Angus, subsequently confirmed that the World Service would take the lead in addressing the ‘Fake News’ threat making use of its 42 language services, knowledge on the ground and BBC Monitoring to spot egregious examples and expose emerging patterns.
The BBC’s Beyond Fake News project, launched in May 2018, set out ambitious solutions focused plans. It aimed to demonstrate trust in the BBC’s journalism and challenge distorted and fake news by creating more content and giving verification training to partners ahead of the elections in Nigeria and India in 2019. The season of special programming culminated on 12th and 13th November, with the launch of new media literacy projects, major research into why people share ‘Fake News’ and events in India and Africa. The details are included below.
BBC Beyond Fake News project
Ground-breaking BBC audience research on why people share ‘Fake News’ carried out in Kenya, Nigeria and India was published on 12th November. This was the first qualitative study to look inside private encrypted networks on WhatsApp and Facebook in these three markets.
It was also one of the first studies to use big data, network analysis and AI tools to understand the sharing of ‘Fake News’.
The impact of ‘Fake News’ in India and Africa has been under-researched compared to the US and Europe, and yet the consequences are serious. For this reason this research and the Beyond Fake News season has focused on these important markets for the BBC’s audience.
Main findings:
See Appendix for the full reports.
Young people hate being lied to. Yet they tend to overestimate their ability to spot ‘Fake News’. BBC ‘Real News’ workshops have been designed to help teenagers develop their critical thinking and to understand how to evaluate sources of information. They also give advice about how to verify text and pictures and to exert caution when sharing on social media. These workshops are already being delivered by BBC journalists to over 2000 young people in the UK via the BBC Young Reporter project. This is on top of the media literacy content available on the BBC’s website, which includes online lesson plans and videos which have been accessed by over 2,000 schools secondary schools. More than 90,000 people have played the BBC i-reporter game.
The ‘Real News’ workshops have been reworked for India, Africa and Brazil and local BBC staff have been trained to deliver the workshops in schools. These are pilot projects that the World Service aims to develop with suitable partners to generate the maximum impact. So far, they have been very well received by both young people and local media.
On 12th November the BBC delivered eight “Beyond Fake News” conferences in India and Kenya. The events brought together key stakeholders from local media and social media platforms, IT students, politicians, entertainers, as well as high profile influencers and opinion formers. The conferences included panel discussions, talks and interviews in front of engaged audiences, including some young people who had attended the BBC’s media literacy workshops. A highlight was a panel of the major tech platforms in India - Google, Twitter and Facebook, who were questioned about the amount of ‘Fake News’ that was being shared and amplified on their platforms. BBC World News’ Matthew Amroliwala chaired the event in front of a sceptical audience.
The BBC also held a technology exhibition in Nairobi to demonstrate how machine learning can both create and spot fakes.
Hackathons were held as part of the Indian and Kenyan events. These were solutions focused technology events, bringing together IT experts, journalists, students and other diverse interested parties, looking for ways to stop people sharing ‘Fake News’ on social networks.
India’s hackathon identified winners in three categories:
1: Tackle Fake News spread through encrypted messaging
2: Check sources of Fake News
3: Check combined text + images / video
BBC News Labs is exploring the development potential of them with tech platforms and fact checking organisations.
In Kenya, the hackathon was hosted by local technology hub, Andela. East Africa’s leading telecoms company, Safaricom, who had a representative on the judging panel, have offered to incubate the three winning developer teams to build their solutions that identify and flag fake images and stories.
The Reality Check team has been expanded, as has the video provision, to help the BBC reach out to younger audiences. New senior producers have been recruited for Delhi and Nairobi to increase fact checking capacity in these regions. Beyond Fake News events in Nigeria are planned ahead of the February election, and there will be BBC fact checking throughout the campaign. The BBC has pledged to deliver daily Reality Checks in the run up to the Indian election.
BBC Monitoring have been world leaders in exposing disinformation since 1939, with special linguistic expertise in Russia, Iran, North Korea, China and the Middle East. They have expanded the team that investigates disinformation, enabling more sharing of expertise with the rest of the BBC and providing an important service to external customers and editorial teams within BBC News.
The government’s additional investment in the World Service has enabled the BBC to create new programmes with a remit to challenge disinformation and ‘Fake News’. Factfinder was launched on 12th November and is a great new source of journalism that will be fact checking stories in Africa. The new children’s programme, What’s New?, is also broadcasting regular slots that help children to understand how to differentiate between real and false information. Other new programmes such as The She Word and Money Daily have also been broadcasting stories about disinformation as part of the Beyond Fake News season.
The launch of a new BBC investigations brand Africa Eye has been the jewel in the crown in delivering in-depth investigative journalism across Africa. The ‘open source’ methodology allows the audience to help with investigations and to check the authenticity of the sources.
For example, in Anatomy of a killing, the Africa Eye team used geo-location techniques and open-source investigation methods to verify footage of Cameroonian soldiers murdering two women and two children. https://bbc.in/2SafWzl
For Like, Share, Kill, the team exposed how disinformation on Facebook was fuelling ethnic violence in Nigeria, and how Facebook’s fact-checking system in the country was fundamentally flawed. https://bbc.in/2DnpNxE
An open source investigations specialist unit is being established within the World Service.
Programmes included:
Russian disinformation and the ‘lab of death’: Correspondent Steve Rosenberg travelled to Tbilisi to investigate Russian state media claims about a secret US-funded ‘death lab’. The claims were typical of Russia’s new information war. https://bbc.in/2BrZaWZ
Burned to death because of a rumour: In August, two innocent men were pulled from a jailhouse in Mexico and burned in the street, because of a rumour on WhatsApp. The BBC went there to find out how ‘Fake News’ turned a small town violent. https://bbc.in/2r2WU21
The digital epidemic killing Indians: Smartphones are making it easier for millions of Indians to share, but misinformation is spreading fast and sometimes turns deadly. This was the story of two men lynched in Assam because of a fake story about child abductions. https://bbc.in/2BpZRjc Also see: https://bbc.in/2DDHNDO
Rewriting history in the Philippines: Correspondent, Howard Johnson, investigates how ‘Fake News’ is being exploited by the Marcos family to rewrite its history ahead of a planned comeback, aided by Facebook’s domination of internet access. https://bbc.in/2qZO5pO
Where ‘Fake News’ is used to silence dissent: BBC Arabic correspondent, Sally Nabil, spoke to relatives of people detained under Egypt’s ‘Fake News’ laws, including Amal Fathy, who was sentenced to two years after she reported sexual assault. https://bbc.in/2R6hNVs
Live programming: BBC World News presenter, Matthew Amroliwala, anchored a day of extraordinary live programming from the BBC’s Beyond Fake News conference in Delhi, with contributions from a parallel conference in Nairobi. It included an experiment involving Matthew Amroliwala and deep fake face mapping technology, available here: https://bbc.in/2S0PKH6
Many more stories published as part of the season are available at bbc.co.uk/beyondfakenews.
Further work planned for the coming year
Appendix – BBC audience research reports:
Duty, Identity, Credibility: ‘Fake News’ and the ordinary citizen in India
Duty, Identity, Credibility: ‘Fake News’ and the ordinary citizen in India – further information on methodology
Verification, Duty, Credibility: Fake News and ordinary citizens in Kenya and Nigeria
(Reports downloadable here)
November 2018